Teamwork & Practice with Young Musicians

This week on the Time to Practice podcast we’re talking about working as a team, with our young musicians, to get practice done. Adopting this mindset, or approach can be a huge game-changer! You can read more about this in this article HERE. This blog post is a transcript, with a few edits for ease of reading, of this week’s podcast episode where I talk about this idea more, including a clip from a recent talk to teachers and parents. I hope you find it helpful as you create a positive, productive working relationship around home music practice.

To Listen to the full episode you can find the Time to Practice Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or your favorite podcast platform. You can also listen directly from the link below:

Teamwork & Young Musicians

I’ve been getting a lot of positive response lately as I’ve been speaking to groups of parents and teachers over the last couple of weeks about a teamwork mindset in practice.

As parents, caregivers, and practice partners, supporting young musicians, this teamwork mindset often helps to make practice more peaceful, effective, and productive. Today, I want to share some thoughts about that in – part from a talk I gave last weekend (January 2022) and share some takeaways that you might put into practice at home this week.

From that talk: I wanted to talk about the teamwork mindset. So I think for me, this is one of those things that I learned, the hard way that I wish I could go back in time and re-practice with my kids more with this in mind.

Of course, I didn’t want to set things up this way, but I think we sort of got a adversarial relationship going at first where I was trying to force practice to happen. And then I felt lmy kids might have been trying to figure out “how do I avoid this if I can?”

And we kind of were doing this tug of war about practice.

Instead if we can really think about how we’re on the same team with each other, trying to get our assignments done for our next lesson or prepare for recital or whatever our project is right now – I think the teamwork I’m talking about is like this: you are doing a relay race and every member’s really important or you’re doing a ropes course or, an escape room where everybody has to work together and get the code to get out.

So we want to think about the fact that we’re both necessary here. How do we work together as a team – it’s really, really valuable. So I’d just like to say: you’re on the same team working together to accomplish the assignments for next week’s lesson.

That feels now to me, like common sense, but I don’t think that’s that way I approached it, if I’m honest, at first with practice. So thinking okay, what does my child need from me to be successful here? Is helpful rather than feeling like, “well, they should do that” or “it should look like this.” I think that that really takes a lot of stress off and then helps us just come on our child’s side and ask “okay, what do they need from me in this moment?”

I love this book, The Power of Showing Up Daniel Siegel and Tina Bryson, Daniel Siegel’s really well known for The Whole Brain Child. He wrote many other great books. This book is all just about how children need present adults in their lives for their successful development. And so this quote here,

“One of the single best predictors for how any child turns out is that they had at least one person who was emotionally attuned and present for them.”

The Power of Showing Up by Tina Bryson & Daniel Siegel

I think about how, if we’re helping our child practice, whether or not we’re in the room coaching them through every note, or we’re just a presence outside the room that gives them a compliment afterwards, or is getting them to lessons and making sure they have what they need . . . having an adult in our lives that sort of helps us pay attention to our emotions.

“Oh, I see you’re really frustrated by this,” or “I’m going to celebrate with you” about that and is showing up for them – this is really key. We have a, a really powerful way to influence our children’s lives through our involvement in their music, whatever age your child is or whatever that might look like at this point in their development.

Teamwork with Teen Musicians

I’m thinking about what does that look like with teens, especially I think just being really positive. I think teens can be really hard on themselves. That’s true in my experience with my own students. They can really use adults in their lives to give them a compliment, to let them know they’re enjoying hearing their music.

I recently shared the picture above with the text “Be Positive.” Someone asked me about this picture – the coffee may seem like a funny thing to share with these words. Let me share where it came from. I had a high school orchestra teacher who had very high expectations.

But when you did something really well, she always said “A plus plus!!!” And so this coffee picture makes me think of her. I remember as a teenager, that her saying those words to me was such motivation. You knew you were never going to get false praise from this teacher. So when I did get glowing positive feedback, it really felt wonderful.

And then I think as practice partners, or support people for teens, sometimes just logistics are how we help them.

• Do they have the music they need?
• Do they have the equipment they need?
• Can they get to their rehearsals or lessons or performances? (Whatever that looks like right now).

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When they’re older, there might not be a teamwork aspect to like the practice time itself, but there’s definitely a teamwork aspect

For example, can we make the family schedule around the fact that our child has a concert or we need to arrange a carpool because somebody can’t drive you today.

Or what device is our child going to use to log onto an online lesson, if that’s what things look like for you right now.

We can think about really making sure our child feels like I’m here to support them and we’re on the same team. Even if their practice looks more independent and we’re not being there, in that moment with them.

A Recap:

Teamwork may be less of a specific practice strategy and more of a practice mentality.

How can of myself as a teammate, perhaps in a relay race, working alongside my child to help them accomplish their practice assignments this week?

And I think that can let some pressure off of us that we don’t have to feel like we’re forcing practice, but we are working on practice together as a team.

I hope this idea is helpful. I’d love to hear how it affected you and home practice at your house if you tried to work on that in your practice this week.